VICTORIA — Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham made unprecedented use of her powers in investigating the B.C. Liberal ethnic outreach scandal, taking testimony under oath for the first time in the 20-year history of her office.

She was probing allegations that the Liberals, in the course of trying to build support in several ethnic communities, had violated privacy legislation by diverting personal information from government files to a partisan database maintained by the Liberal party.

Denham and her staff put four witnesses under oath: Brian Bonney, one of the architects of the strategy; Fiera Lo, a staffer involved in setting it up, Michele Cadario, a Liberal party official now working as deputy chief of staff to the premier; and Sepideh Sarrafpour, a former contract worker on multicultural issues.

The latter name was germane to the most recent phase of the scandal, which arose after the election when the Liberals released information gathered by a team of four deputy ministers in the course of their investigation into the scandal.

The New Democrats drew much attention to a heavily censored government-authored email that suggested Sarrafpour had damaging information about the ethnic outreach strategy and should therefore be offered a job to keep her quiet.

Denham had access to the same documentation, and unlike the material made public and reviewed by the NDP, it was in unredacted form.

“My investigators interviewed Sepideh Sarrafpour as we believed she might have knowledge of information regarding the potential sharing of personal information between government and the B.C. Liberal Party,” Denham wrote in a report released Thursday. “However, our interview of Ms. Sarrafpour did not result in any additional information relevant to our investigation.”

Nor was that the only dead end in the commissioner’s investigation into allegations of sharing of personal information between government and party. Along with all the information gathered by the four deputies in their investigation, she also had access to a report on the affair from the B.C. Liberal caucus, including witness statements and emails gathered as part of that still-confidential exercise.

But in the end, she found nothing to support the allegations of improper sharing of personal information between government and party. “No evidence,” as she put it several places in the report, closing the book on that aspect of the case.

But she wasn’t done holding the Liberals to account. For there was plenty of evidence of another potential abuse of the provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act — namely the “commonplace” use of personal email accounts by government employees for government business.

“A worrying trend,” she called it, because it removes email from the security cordon protecting government servers and could lead to data being compromised or even lodged in foreign jurisdictions.

Plus there’s the likelihood “that personal email accounts were used as a back channel with the intention of avoiding access to information requests under legislation.” John Yap, one of the cabinet ministers at the centre of the ethnic outreach scandal, admitted as much in the course of the earlier investigation by the four deputies.

“I am concerned that this demonstrates an acceptance and familiarity within government of the practice of evading freedom of information requests,” wrote Denham.

Moreover, the practice extended to the highest reaches in the government, as evidenced by the conduct of Kim Haakstad, deputy chief of staff to Premier Christy Clark at the time she and others hatched the ethnic outreach strategy.

Haakstad “was emailing the outreach plan from her personal email account to the personal email accounts of various individuals within government, the B.C. Liberal Party and government caucus,” as Denham notes in her report.

“Government should have been taking steps to ensure that it was preserving correspondence relating to the outreach plan on its own servers both in the name of good governance as well as for the responsible preservation of documents that could be the subject of future access to information requests.”

Not for the first time was the information commissioner moved to put the B.C. Liberals on notice on this matter. After investigating why few written records were generated in connection with last year’s forced departure of Ken Boessenkool as the premier’s chief of staff, Denham issued cautionary guidelines on the need to put things in writing and on the public record.

“The use of personal email accounts for work purposes can give the perception that public body employees are seeking to evade the freedom of information process,” she wrote. “Doing so may make it more difficult for their employer to search for records. Employees may be unwilling to produce records from their personal account or to allow access to their accounts for that purpose.”

The information watchdog concludes her latest report with a half-dozen recommendations on curbing the abuses of personal email, which the Liberals promptly promised to adopt.

But it remains to be seen whether the governing party will abandon habits built up over a dozen years in power and nurtured at the highest level under the current premier. As Denham has discovered, the Liberals need watching, and watching closely.

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